Happy 116th Birthday Norman Rockwell!

“I’m not going to be caught around here for any fool celebration. To hell with birthdays!” —Norman Rockwell(Feb. 3, 1894 – Nov. 8, 1978)

Today’s Google doodle celebrates Norman Rockwell’s birthday

Happy Birthday Norman Rockwell!! To honor the most popular and well-known American artist of all time, today’s Google doodle incorporates an illustration by Norman Rockwell entitled Little Spooners. The popular painting appeared on the front cover of the Saturday Evening Post on April 24, 1926.

Not long ago, Park West Gallery Director, Morris Shapiro, wrote an original essay Experiencing Rockwell, offering his thoughts on the artist. In part:

“Norman Rockwell produced over 4,000 works of art in his lifetime, a lifetime that he devoted to unfailing artistic discipline and committed to sharing his view of our world with an emphasis on humankind’s higher morals and enduring values. His messages of family, equality, freedom, tolerance, and even human shortcomings touched more Americans than any other artist with our shared heritage. His contributions to the American spirit during World War II are legendary, particularly in the way that he focused not so much on our soldiers fighting abroad but on the heroism and bravery of the everyday people who remained at home.

From my own experience, it has been an honor to work with Curtis Publishing, the owners of the intellectual rights to Rockwell’s Saturday Evening Post imagery, and the Norman Rockwell Licensing Company, managed by the artist’s family, in the development of limited edition prints created exclusively for Park West Gallery clients. More recently, these works have been realized as hand-drawn lithographs created at the same studio French artist Marcel Mouly used for the creation of his lithographs.

I’ve also had the pleasure of offering original Rockwell drawings and seeing several of them collected. It is truly a thrill for an art dealer to be a part of the joy experienced by someone who has the rare opportunity to acquire something of this kind of rarity and historic importance. Through this process and in viewing so many of his works, I have gained a deeper appreciation for Rockwell’s art…” Read More >>